1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to graphical user interfaces, geographical maps, business directories, online search engines, and in car navigation systems. More particularly, the present invention relates to a method, apparatus, and computer program product for providing a graphical user interface with a linear map component incorporating graphical information related to transportation segments such as highways, roads, railroads, subways, and rivers, in conjunction with textual information relating to points of interest (POIs) that are located along the depicted transportation segments.
2. Description of the Prior Art
There are many situations where a person needs to know detailed information associated with a specific transportation segment such as a road. This detailed information may be in the form of address ranges, intersecting street names, or the names of associated POIs (such as business or residential entities) occurring along a specified roadway. For example, a person may need to find the name of the intersecting street closest to a specified address, or the names and locations of all restaurants occurring near a downtown office tower.
In earlier times, this type of information was recorded manually on paper maps. These maps were meticulously drawn by hand and updated in a laborious process whenever changes occurred. This type of map can still be found today, but as technology has become more sophisticated, computerized mapping systems have been developed.
Two-dimensional maps in which directed line segments represent roads can be generated either manually, or through the use of computers by reading from a database of geographic information. Highways, roads, and cities are located on such maps based upon their associated latitude and longitude coordinates. With the incorporation of shape information depicting curvilinear map features, computer generated and displayed maps are identical in appearance to geographically accurate manually generated paper maps.
Although it is relatively easy to graphically depict the streets occurring within a designated geographic region, it is somewhat more difficult to show textual information including point of interest (POI) designators such as the names of hotels, restaurants, and various other POIs falling within the designated region. In the more densely developed areas of the city, there may not be room to display the names of all of these entities. A high-rise office building, for example, may have dozens, if not hundreds of businesses associated with the same street address. Furthermore, the streets may be oriented in such a way that it becomes difficult or awkward to incorporate textual POI designators (as would be the case if the street were oriented horizontally across the display).
Due to the difficulty of incorporating large amounts of textual data with maps, most previous attempts at solving this problem have taken the “pushpins” approach whereby a small icon is displayed at each POI location. An example of this type of approach can be found in the prior art FIG. 7 and is referred to here as the pushpins 2 approach. In this case, the icons consist of small boxes containing numbers that are related to individual POIs. The user would have to either click on an individual icon or look at a corresponding legend to determine the name of the specific POI in question. Note that in the pushpins 2 part of the map depicted in FIG. 7 the density of POIs displayed results in the overlapping of icons, whereby individual icons can no longer be clearly distinguished. In other prior art cases, different icons are used to depict POIs of different types. For example, a restaurant icon might show a fork and a spoon, and a hotel icon might show a small building with a gable roof. This additional level of information is beneficial, but does not overcome the problem of overlapping icons as described above.
Another approach, depicted above E 4th Street in FIG. 7, shows POI names near the associated icons 4. Here again, we run into the same density problems, resulting at times, in overlapping, and unreadable text. Although the POI names near the associated icons 4 do not overlap one another, it is easy to see that this condition would occur in areas of the map where the icons overlap. The high-rise office building example stated above would also pose problems if one were to attempt to display the names of all businesses located in the building. The example with the POI names near the associated icons 4 in FIG. 7 works reasonably well partly because of the orientation of the road on which the POIs occur. If however, text were to be added to a series of closely spaced POI icons placed horizontally along E 5th Street, problems with overlapping would likely arise.
It is the non-uniform and curving nature of the typical city road network that makes the incorporation of related textual information difficult. The problem of representing data associated with curving roadways has been explored previously in the development of the straight-line diagram (also sometimes referred to as a strip map). FIG. 9 depicts an example of a straight-line diagram 6 in the prior art generated by the New Jersey Department of Transportation. These diagrams overcome the difficulty of depicting the lengths of contiguous curving road segments by showing these segments as a straight horizontal line. The example in FIG. 9 shows the straight-line diagram 6 for Monmouth Street near the center of the figure. Directly above the straight-line diagram 6 is a map highlighting Monmouth Street 8 as it would appear in a typical two-dimensional map. The use of straight-line diagrams by state highway departments has recently fallen out of favor as computerized Geographic Information Systems have come to prominence. To date, straight-line diagrams have been employed as printed maps. Although such maps can be accessed via computer systems, they permit no user interactivity beyond the viewing of the map image.
On-line computer systems, such as the Internet, are well known in the art. The Internet is a giant network connecting numerous networks together to enable access to a wide array of information. A home computer with an Internet connection accesses this information via a software interface known as a web browser. Unique Internet addresses are entered into the web browser to specify web sites relating to virtually every topic imaginable. Internet documents consisting of textual and graphical information are typically encoded in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). HTML formatted documents often include hypertext links (or links). Hypertext links are user selectable words, phrases, or pictures that enable users to access the display of one informational content element from another. For a more detailed description of the Internet please refer to “Internet: The Complete Reference, Millennium Edition” by Margaret Levine Young, published by McGraw-Hill, 1999.
Most online mapping systems deliver maps to the user in the form of bitmap image files. Such files store information relating to each individual pixel in the map image. Larger images, having a larger number of pixels, typically result in larger file sizes. When a user accesses a map over a computer network such as the Internet, image files are often the bottleneck resulting in long periods of waiting while the files are downloaded. This problem is exacerbated when low bandwidth mobile devices such as cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and various other handheld computers are employed to access data over the Internet. These devices currently require that the size of data transmissions be as small as possible. They also have very small display screens that can't typically show as much information as a standard desktop computer monitor.
Internet based search engines can be very helpful in locating information related to specific subjects or entities. Most search engines, however, attempt to include (or index) as many web pages as possible. Therefore, when searching for information related to a specific entity, or to a specific branch or office of a company, the search engine is likely to return a multitude of links to related web pages. Anyone looking to access the primary web page associated with the branch of a company at a specific geographic location will often have to search through a large list to find it.
In car navigation systems, which are well known in the art, provide another possible means of accessing location based information (via the Internet or other sources). In this mobile environment, the user typically would be less willing to spend time searching for the desired POI information than would a user with a home computer. Providing mobile users, and specifically automobile based users with the desired link in a timely fashion is a top priority.
Many maps or mapping applications display information that is not needed by the map user, while excluding information that could be helpful. A person walking or driving down a specific road may not care to see depictions of nearby non-intersecting roads, but might be very interested in seeing address ranges for road along his or her traveled route.
Accordingly, a need exists for a solution that overcomes the above-noted drawbacks associated with existing approaches and systems.